Category Archives: Poop Jokes

Toto is Japan’s biggest toilet bowl making company. You see the logo everywhere you go–at the airport, in department stores, at people’s homes. Now you may also see it on the road–the company just released its first hybrid toilet-motorcycle that runs entirely on poop! As the person drives, he can poop into the bowl, and that poop will be turned into fuel for the car. It’s actually part of a campaign that Toto is running in an effort to reduce its CO2 emissions by 50% in the next 6 years. The motorcycle will be making its way from Kyushu to Tokyo over the next month (departing in six days). Very exciting! I’m not sure who’s driving but I’m sure that, in addition to having a drivers license, they had to check his stool to make sure its healthy and fuel-worthy.

I’m sure you’ve seen this already because it’s been making the rounds on the Internet, but I finally have found the bandwidth to post it. I love Hachiya-san, the creator–I wrote about him in Make Mag in 2009.

My friend Ichiru took a photo of this storefront signage wishing all customers and passersby a happy new year. It’s supposed to be a little mochi decoration, but he points out–and I absolutely agree–that it looks a lot like poop.

I’ve written about poop a lot on this blog, but I didn’t know about the Himeji Poop Museum until today. The poop museum has a collection of different animal poops on display, that apparently you can poke and play with, in addition to an entire collection of books about poop—including one made out of repurposed elephant poop! Above, you are looking at zebra poop on the left and elephant poop on the right.

I thought Japan was the poop capital of the world, but apparently I was way off. A toilet-themed restaurant in Taipei now serves poop-like chocolate soft serve in black-and-white urinals to 100 customers sitting in toilet bowls instead of chairs. There are actually not one not two but twelve of these Modern Toilet diners in Taiwan.

This is Mayu Yamamoto. She is a Japanese woman who recently won an international award for extracting a flavor eerily similar to vanilla from cow poo.

The Japanese are no strangers to the Ig Nobel Prize. Dr. NakaMats, our favorite inventor, won it in 2005 for documenting 35 years worth of meals, and 10 others have also won the silly science award, which is handed out by categories every year by the Harvard-based Annals of Improbable Research.

What an exciting week for Japan! Not only did we land a probe on the moon, but we figured out how to make poo taste good! Very, very important stuff.

Do you really need more proof that Japanese people love toilet jokes? This photograph, taken by nanotechnologist Kaito Takahashi, won the Most Bizzare Award at a conference on electrons, ions, and photo beam technology a couple years ago. He took it using an electron microscope at 15,000x magnification while working at a lab in Shizuoka. And even though it’s actually a photo of an integrated circuit, he decided to call it "Small Toilet."

Has some dog designated your front porch as his favorite pooping spot? This sign, which reads "TAKE YOUR DOG SHIT HOME," is sure to scare him and his irresponsible owner into picking up after their own poo poo.

A reader in Okinawa found this and many other entertaining home stickers (kinda like bumper stickers, except not as many people in Japan have cars) in a 100 yen shop.

According to this loud, colorful wrapping on these toilet paper rolls, if you wipe your shit with this stuff your bowel movements will improve. I don’t think there’s any science to it, but there is a little diagram pointing to the constipation pressure point on your hand.

Actually, let me back up a sec and be more specific. The yellow roll facilitates pooping; the pink and green are more educational, teaching you has-been words (in Japanese they’re called "dead words," words that used to be popular but aren’t anymore) and Chinese characters for different fish species, respectively.

Hahahaha! This game is hilarious. You’re a chubby Asian kid with a finger sticking up in the air. Your goal is to avoid the droppings coming out of the pooping star-spangled panty woman above. Must I say more? I don’t think so.

Toymaker Epoch has come up with this genius poop-shaped mini-flashlight for carrying around with your keys or gadgets. I love it—and I love that my readers immediately told me about it because they know I have a thing for poop.

It’s a Japanese thing, we love poop jokes.

We love poop so much that we even have names for the different kinds. For example, this one is called a makiguso, which literally means "crap roll." (Same "maki" that is in sushi rolls, like tekkamaki and futomaki.) It alludes to the spiraling shape that the poop makes as it clumps on top of itself.

This is not just a cartoon drawing of any dog’s butt. This dog butt is the icon for Wakabadai’s Pooper Troopers—a team of a dozen students and teachers intent on ridding the streets of dog poop that hasn’t been picked up. To do this, the team goes out on poop-flagging missions, flagging suspect brown piles and documenting its location and status on their notepads. Then they get together in a meeting room to discuss the problem at greater length.

Their goals are threefold (according to their web site, which has photos of this process, too):

1. To make Wakabadai beautiful and poop-free. 2. To draft a Declaration of Doggie Poop.3. To complete the mission within three years and to disband Pooper Troopers by 2010.

I’m dead serious! This is what it says on the site! More pics of poop with GW Bush’s face flagged on it after the jump.

Did I ever tell you how much Japanese people like poop? Well, we love it. So much so that there are Gachapon machines that sell miniature versions of poop. And we clean toilets for good luck, and we have poop cell phone straps, and we hit our heads with poop on sticks.

As I found out this past weekend after watching the cyberpunk adventure anime Aatchi and Ssipak, the Koreans have a completely different take on poop. Poop and juicybars!

Shukan Gendai just clued me in as to why my luck’s been faltering these days. I rendered my laptop obsolete by spilling OJ on the keyboard; dropped my cell phone in a NYC ditch, destroying the display; and woke up to find out that my next door neighbor had died while I was out. It turns out, though, that there’s a perfectly sound reason for my misfortunes. I wasn’t paying adequate homage to the toilet gods.

Apparently, cleaning your toilet frequently has proven to turn your luck from shit-filled to ceramically shiny. A former rock star testifies that stocks they owned suddenly rose in value when he started wiping his bowl daily; filmmaker Beat Takeshi admitted that he had followed a fortune teller’s advice to do the same during his awards speech for Hana-Bi at the Venice Film Festival. This also explains a lot of mysterious trends in Japan, like why an enshrined golden poop is the top-selling cell phone strap in the nation.

What’s holier than God? Poop, of course. The Japanese really, really worship poop. So much so that this golden poop–which sits on a custom royal red cushion and is protected by a screen of good fortune–is sold at shrines all over the country. Its cell phone strap counterpart has sold over 2.7 million units. I shit you not!

You can get your own golden poop here. Or enter my golden poop contest!

Akihabara is famous for being geek heaven, but starting in October it will also host the first public luxury toilet facilites in Chiyoda Ward. For 100 yen, commuters using the central exit at Akiba station are guaranteed a clean, aromatic, well-guarded toilet facility, complete with an information center and a separate smoking section. A survey revealed that only 3% of public toilet users are women. (Don’t ask me why such statistics exist. This is Japan, the country that loves “shimoneta,” or stories about things that happen below your waist and above your thighs.)

I have two questions for Chiyoda Ward:
1. What about people who like to smoke while they poo?
2. Are you screening their security guards to make sure they don’t have tendencies toward climbing over toilet stalls and molesting women?

I am also the founder of The Tofu Project, a boutique program that helps Japanese entrepreneurs and creators think deeper, tell better stories, and go out into the world in a much bigger way. We work with companies like Mixi, Japan Airlines, and Salesforce.com.

Sometimes I try to explain Japanese culture on CNN, BBC, CBC, WSJ, ABC (so many acronyms!) or in person at places like the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan, ETech, and Ignite!